The cover of John Waters’ “Role Models” from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Profiles in subversion
Decades ago now, my history-teaching dad gave me a yellowed copy of John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage” with the instruction, “Read.”
Robert Kennedy, in the forward, said his brother’s book contained “not just stories of the past but a hook of hope and confidence for the future. What happens to the country, to the world, depends on what we do with what others have left us.”
But I couldn’t “read.” Those “Profiles in Courage” stories were boring then, and they still were boring when I picked up a new edition of the book a couple of years ago.
So now I’m wondering, what does it mean that I wouldn’t finish “Profiles in Courage,” but I couldn’t put down “Role Models,” John Waters’ profiles of a very different sort?
Yes, I wanted to read about Waters’ original “Bad Seed” Patty McCormack. No, I didn’t want to read about Kennedy’s Daniel Webster. Yes, I wanted to read about Manson girl Leslie Van Houten. No, I didn’t want to read about Robert A. Taft. Yes, I wanted to read about pornographer Bobby Garcia. No, I didn’t want to read about John Quincy Adams. Yes, I wanted to read about Little Richard’s “a-wop-bop-a-loo-mop” rise to fame. No, I didn’t want to read about Sam Houston opposing Texas’ secession from the Union.
Read more...Wonder years
Back in the Sixties and Seventies, when a young boy was in his formative years there was no question of being openly gay. Yet there were a number of courses one could take. Most kids did a good job of blending in, some gave up and wore feather boas, and then there were those who tried but had the boa sticking out of their back pocket.
Eric Poole’s new memoir "Where's My Wand" (from Amy Einhorn Books) reminsces about his life in suburban Saint Louis in the mid-1970s. That life had a couple of extra burdens going for it. Of course, what is a burden at the time becomes a bonus when you’re looking for material.
For one thing, the Pooles were observant Southern Baptists. Not so religious that they couldn't indulge a glass of Mateus Rosé now and then, but observant, nonetheless. Oddly enough, his mom seemed to worship from a slightly rewritten Bible, one that had commandments like “Thou shalt scrub down the patio with Ajax, humbly” and “Honor thy living room by not setting foot in it.”
What Eric becomes convinced of, the glue that ties the anecdotes together, is that he can affect the future by wishing it so. While it’s not unusual to pray to a higher power, or even believe that following rules of superstition can affect reality, it is a little out of the ordinary to don a faux fur cape and pretend that you are Endora from “Bewitched.” My year of magical thinking, indeed.
Read more...
Handmade Love
Spring reading list
Poetry in motion
National Poetry Month (April) has come and gone, but it left us with plenty to ponder and enjoy. Queer poets led the way with several releases of note.
The late gay poet Jame Schuyler’s “Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems” (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010), edited by James Meetze and Simon Pettet, arrives almost 20 years after his passing and nearly 30 years after he received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Read more...Fighting the ‘Good’ War
James Lord, in his career as a biographer and memoirist, created revealing portraits of Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti and a vivid documentary of life in post-WWII France.
Lord, who died in August 2009 at the age of 86, was an intimate of Picasso and Giacometti. He knew the Parisian arts community. The New York Times, in an obituary, described him as a “a kind of Boswell to the artistic and social elite in France.”
And how did he arrive on that scene?
That is part of the powerful story of Lord’s autobiographical “My Queer War,” which the writer completed shortly before his death. Farrar, Straus & Giroux published the book in April.
“My Queer War” is brutally honest – and occasionally brutal.
“My Queer War” is sometimes tawdry – and often tender.
“My Queer War” is Lord’s story of how he came to enlist in WWII and how he coped as an odd-man-out in the Armed Forces, a queer man in times that make the “don’t ask, don’t tell” military seem progressive.
Read more...Rise, fall, rise of Verace
The first bullet that hit Gianni Versace also fatally wounded a mourning dove.
That is the kind of detail readers get from Wall Street Journal reporter and author Deborah Ball in her riveting “House of Versace: The Untold Story of Genius, Murder and Survival,” a new non-fiction work from Random House/Crown Publishing that must be on some desks in Hollywood.
Ball knows her job well – how to research, interview, report and write. For “House” she conducted 220 interviews with friends, family, former lovers, co-workers, rivals and business partners of the Versaces, as well as reviewed three decades of financial records, historical footage of runway shows, police reports and public records in Milan and Calabria, New York and Miami. Prior to writing the book, she worked in Milan and Rome.
Read more...Opinion
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